Seamless ServiceNow CMDB sync & problem detection

March 21, 2017

Managing highly dynamic service and application infrastructures with a CMDB database can be cumbersome and error prone. Modern microservices infrastructures commonly contain thousands of individual business-critical services and related dependencies. Dynatrace automatically discovers and monitors all such services and applications in real time, detects deviations from normal behavior (availability, performance, and/or errors), and synchronizes this data with your ServiceNow instance.

Dynatrace anomaly detection

The first step toward gaining full technology insight into each individual service request of each of your customers is to install Dynatrace OneAgent on your hosts. Once installed, OneAgent automatically discovers all software services and applications running on your host and detects all communication relationships between your services in real time.
Dynatrace immediately calculates a multi-dimensional baseline with up to 10K cells for each service and application in your environment. This baseline allows Dynatrace to automatically detect degradations from normal behavior and inform you about complex problems and any impact on customer experience. Problems include detail related to all affected services and applications, their relationships, as well as root cause information that is correlated with each individual service.

Dynatrace ServiceNow CMDB synchronization

With the new Dynatrace ServiceNow CMDB synchronization application, all auto-discovered hosts, applications, and services—along with their relationships—can be synchronized with your ServiceNow ITIL CMDB database.
The main benefits of seamless integration between Dynatrace and your ServiceNow instance are:

Automatic synchronization of auto-detected services and applications, along with their used_by relationships, in real time.

Automatic synchronization of monitored hosts and virtual machines, along with their attributes.

The image below compares how the synchronization of a Dynatrace-discovered application and its relationships to auto-discovered business-critical services looks in Dynatrace Smartscape and how it looks when synchronized within the ServiceNow dependency map.
Another benefit for ServiceNow users is detailed descriptions of all application dependencies within each architectural layer, as shown below.
When Dynatrace discovers an availability, performance, or error-related problem within your environment, the problem is pushed to your ServiceNow instance and automatically mapped with previously synchronized CMDB CI elements, as shown below.
To fully benefit from Dynatrace state of the art AI-powered technology monitoring with ServiceNow, head over to the ServiceNow app store and install the Dynatrace Monitoring and CMDB Integration application.
For more detail on synchronizing Dynatrace monitoring with ServiceNow, see How do I set up ServiceNow problem notifications?

Wolfgang is a Technical Product Manager at Dynatrace. He has a long record of research in software analytics and mobile computing. At Dynatrace, he's responsible for baseline calculation and event correlation in performance analytics. He also drives the topic of mobile app monitoring.